Before proceeding down the path yoou suggested, I tried something else first. I removed the dovecot rpm, grabbed the latest source tarball from the dovecot site, built and installed it. The only configure option I gave it was "prefix=/usr/local/dovecot". I'm starting and stopping it via a copy of the init script that came with the rpm, modified to find dovecot where I installed it. I did a most basic configuration, starting with the example conf file and (mostly) only tweaking what I had to to get it to run. Here it is, with comments stripped out:
protocols = imap disable_plaintext_auth = no syslog_facility = local0 ssl_disable = yes mail_location = mbox:~:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/indexes/%u protocol imap { listen = *:10143 } protocol pop3 { } protocol lda { postmaster_address = postmaster@example.com } auth default { mechanisms = plain passdb pam { } userdb passwd { } user = root } dict { } plugin { }
I created the /etc/pam.d/dovecot file as described in the wiki. I also created /var/indexes, owned by root:mail with permissions drwxrwxrwt - the same as /var/spool/mail is (which /var/mail is a symlink to).
This build & configuration seems to be working just fine, in that it can access my INBOX and my other folders just fine, with no crashes. Now I will start adding SSL and the AUTH stuff that postfix needs, to the configuration. If anything breaks, I'll report it and troubleshoot it however you'd like (assuming I haven't simply mis-configured it somehow). I just thought before we did that, that I should start from a most basic configuration of the latest source, to provide a known starting point. :)
For reference, this is version 1.0.rc16, built on RH9.
-ste